Thursday, July 29, 2010

2010 Belgian Open, day 4, task 2

Yesterday morning looked like a perfect flying day. Sunny and almost no winds. We discussed a 120 km task while driving up to Chabre. During briefing it was already clear that the NW winds were increasing and we removed the turnpoint at Pic de Bure, because it could be very turbulent there. That gave us a 94 km task. But, on the horizon, a thick cirrus layerwas coming our way. As it turned out, the cirrus was covering just about our task area the whole afternoon. Just after the briefing, Malcolm and I looked at each other and Malcolm said "what a rubbish task we have set". I agreed.Tom launched early to make as much distance as he could before the cirrus shut down everyting. So, although I did not really want to start early, I had to start too. Tom got low and really had to work to get high. The same happened to me, I had to work for 45 minutes before I could start the task. Tom was long gone by then.It turned out to be very difficult and I managed to fly 59 km, which is 3 more than Tom did. Nick Pain was the task winner with 63 km. But, because no one made goal, it was a low scoring task. While I feared that I was losing points while flying, I slightly extended my lead in the general classification. I now have 1400 points with Gijs Wanders (NL) in second place (1300 points). Second Belgian is Tom with 1000 points.